GORDON BROWN didn’t mention Jeremy Corbyn once in his much-touted speech to Labour Party lawyers, but its sole goal was to mobilise opposition to the leadership front-runner.

His delivery, as he wandered like a stand-up comic from one side of his stage to the other, traced a link from party founder Keir Hardie to the present day.

From Hardie to James Maxton, Ramsay MacDonald, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock, Donald Dewar and John Smith, along with guest appearances by Nelson Mandela, Elton John, Oprah Winfrey and Gandhi, Brown’s message was the same.

Society’s poor and vulnerable people need a Labour government, which obliges the party and its leader to be “credible” and “electable.”

The former leader claimed that his intention was not to attack any candidate or to tell anyone to abandon their high ideals, but he regretted that the “grouping” seen to be leading the way “was the least likely to be able to form a government.”

In case anyone harboured doubts over which “grouping” he had in his sights, Brown sneered at the spectre of a global alliance that might include “Hezbollah, Hamas, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” thereby playing along with gutter media misrepresentation of Corbyn’s views.

Brown’s call for international co-operation “to solve the problems of global inequality and poverty” sits ill with his patronage of the Jewish National Fund that raises finance to pursue Israeli colonisation of occupied Palestine and promotes ever-increasing inequality and poverty.

The New Labour grandee cited the achievements of the 1997-2010 Labour governments, saying that they had tackled poverty built up by the Tories.

Listing policies as diverse as Sure Start, New Deal, devolution, ending section 28 anti-gay discrimination and achieving higher recruitment in the NHS and schools, Brown declared that none of these was a mistake.

“It is not a mistake now to want power,” he intoned, counterposing the need for “government that is credible, that is radical, and is electable” against the unnamed Corbynite alternative of a “a party of permanent protest” or “a party that can make a noise but not make a change.”

Supposed New Labour big beasts have certainly made plenty of noise in recent weeks, but, like Brown, they ignore key issues.

If the Blair-Brown governments were unalloyed successes, why did Labour lose five million votes over its period in office?

Why was Labour all but wiped out in Scotland in the general election despite Brown’s reputed “game-changing” contribution in the independence vote?

As long-time chancellor, Brown directed economic policy, backing privatisation and PFI schemes that have loaded huge debts on future generations, sucked up to the City, agreeing to “light-touch” regulation of banks that made financial crisis inevitable, and even boasted that he had abolished capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles.

A little more modesty and less pomposity might have been required in his “get Corbyn” diatribe.

In common with Blair, Brown has clearly not read Corbyn’s economic plans, which are serious and at least as costed as those proposed by austerity advocates.

The former leader’s bid to assert personal ownership of what constitutes radical, credible and electable ignores the reality of unremitting electoral defeats for him and those sharing his supposedly sensible and responsible approach.

The tens of thousands flocking to Corbyn’s rallies do so because they are inspired by well-founded hope and are convinced that his approach to tackling economic and political problems is more credible and popular than any advanced by austerity zealots.